Robert_Frazer
2008-01-06, 09:41 AM
Most of you have probably patronised or at least browsed the large import site, Play-Asia (http://www.play-asia.com/), at some point in your gaming careers. Recently, Play-Asia decided to extend its scope into publishing games as well as vending them, and under the "Eastasiasoft" label the first fruit of their labours has been Sidequest Studio's Soldner-X: Himmelssturmer.
[Link to website] (http://www.soldner-x.com/)
The slow, lingering decline of the Western arcade scene might mean that we're less likely to encounter the classic genre of scrolling shooters nowadays (which is a shame, seeing as we developed a number of important titles such as Defender), but over in the Nippon they still retain quite a healthy presence. Indeed, much in the same way that PopCap Games churns out casual puzzlers like Bejewelled in our hemisphere, scrolling shooters are a staple of small bedroom firms and start-up companies in Japan - consoles such as the Dreamcast, while they may be commercially dead, still retain a healthy homebrew presence, with scrolling shooters dominating modern output. Soldner-X is an attempt to restore scrolling shooters to the West and, intrigued, I purchased the PC Collector's Edition (the game will also be available on the Playstation Network) in order to assess their success.
The Collector's Edition itself is a decent package, holding in a glossy sleeve the game with a small certificate of authenticity, a soundtrack CD with a couple of additional bonus tracks, and a hardback booklet including artwork, some light background detail to the game's scenario, and comprehensive tables examining the strengths and weaknesses of every enemy that you'll face in detail (quite astonishingly useful, actually, seeing as without the game actually tells you to learn their vulnerabilities just by observation in the middle of a brutal firefight...!) - which does demonstrate a welcome indicator that the art direction of Soldner-X is impressive and detailed.
The game itself is a horizontal scrolling shooter. Scrolling shooters tend to be simple affairs in being resolutely and affirmedly 2D - that's why they're so popular with small developer groups - but Sidequest Studios has resolved to make the genre more appealing to our graphics-generation by sprucing it up and polishing presentation to a blinding gleam. Effusions of colour well out from every pixel, vessels are rendered in a varnished three dimensions, neon particle effects flash and seethe across the screen as ships exchange fire, backgrounds are fantastically detailed backdrops to frame the action (some enemy classes are even disguised against them!) and smears of burning orange bloom across the landscape as enemies detonate. Every level concludes with a slide-show cutscene depicting your fighter progressing to a new area, but while the plot is the usual shooter hokum - prototype fighter is the last, best, only hope against an unstoppable evil horde - and the narrator plainly doesn't have English as a first language, it does allow the superb painted art to be exhibited in full fine array, which is certainly nothing to complain of.
Soldner-X also is endowed with plenty of replay value. Scrolling Shooters are rarely cakewalks at the best of times, but Soldner-X is fantastically hard! I've played more than fifteen times and haven't even reached level three of ten yet - and you can only earn additional credits by success! Design is intelligent and inventive, with enemies that are diverse both in their indentity and their attack patterns, sometimes doing quite surprising things and taking unusual courses which will continually surprise and wrong-foot you... occasionally to the point of exasperation; those which actually home in on your ship and chase you around the screen will have you swearing at the screen. Even so, though, your frustrations can mainly be attributed to a lack of skill more than the game deliberately setting out to confound you. A global score leaderboard system is also installed into the game, so there is an incentive to push through and further even if the high score board on your PC is filled with your name alone.
The quality of the sound that frames such action is impressively high. Sound effects - from the pew-pew of your laser, the seething crackle of lighting bolts and the concussive bangs and barooms of detonating ships - are entirely competent, and the music is attractive, consisting of melodic techno and electronica themes that form an effective background to the sci-fi setting and futuristic action without deafeningly intruding into the actual gameplay. An announcer will even cut in at sections to praise or berate you: "Time to improve your score - go gettem all!", "Do you even know how to fly a ship?", "Outstanding! Nothing can stop you now!", "Not bad - looks like you've done this before" and so on" and so on - with an entertainingly bombastic voice; it constitutes an endearing and happy reminder of the arcade nature of the game - when you're going cross-eyed trying to weave a course through the bullet hell, it introduces a degree of levity and lets you focus on enjoying yourself.
The actual mechanics of shooting down the endless waves of foes have been curiously tweaked. Rather than having a single light feather-touch sending you spinning to oblivion, both you and your enemies have health bars (with a "Berzerker mode" that improves your damage and increases your armour engaging when the health bar diminishes to less than a fifth), and your weapons also have limited supplies of energy in order to encourage you not to just leave a brick weighing down the fire button whilst you toddle off to have a cup of tea. Bonuses are, of course, integral to the shooting experience - as recently relayed in GamesTM, a sense of empowerment is crucial to the captivating appeal of the genre, and upgrading your weapons from a weedy pop-gun to a blazing and furious pillar of scathing incandescent oblivion is a crucial manner of attaining that catharthic pleasure. The manner in which Soldner-X acquires them, however, is distinct. Defeated enemies occasionally drop bonuses (and some even slyly discharge negative bonuses which harm your abilities!), but in the main you need to utilises the "chain" system. A bonus bar levels-up when you destroy a certain range of enemies with one weapon, but change your weapon before you've killed enough - or kill too many with the weapon you have equipped - and your progress will be lost and you'll need to charge that level again. Complete a certain number of levels, and a bonus is released for colection. It's an intriguing system: glancing down at the bottom of the screen to check your progress can be distracting, and being landed with an inappropriate weapon for the type of enemy you face can vex, but it does introduce a degree of strategy to what you'll dare to use when confronted by an entire wall of foes.
Overall, then, Soldner-X: Himmelssturmer is a celebration of old-school hi-octane arcade blasting action, with enough refinements to keep it fresh and appealing to modern sensibilities as well as retro enthusiasts. It's a worthy first effort from Sidequest Studios, a good marquee for Play Asia to promote its own proprietry publishing line, and for those who want to both leap in with all guns blazing and take a more tactical view of their firefights, Soldner-X can satisfy it with eminent explosiveness.
[Link to website] (http://www.soldner-x.com/)
The slow, lingering decline of the Western arcade scene might mean that we're less likely to encounter the classic genre of scrolling shooters nowadays (which is a shame, seeing as we developed a number of important titles such as Defender), but over in the Nippon they still retain quite a healthy presence. Indeed, much in the same way that PopCap Games churns out casual puzzlers like Bejewelled in our hemisphere, scrolling shooters are a staple of small bedroom firms and start-up companies in Japan - consoles such as the Dreamcast, while they may be commercially dead, still retain a healthy homebrew presence, with scrolling shooters dominating modern output. Soldner-X is an attempt to restore scrolling shooters to the West and, intrigued, I purchased the PC Collector's Edition (the game will also be available on the Playstation Network) in order to assess their success.
The Collector's Edition itself is a decent package, holding in a glossy sleeve the game with a small certificate of authenticity, a soundtrack CD with a couple of additional bonus tracks, and a hardback booklet including artwork, some light background detail to the game's scenario, and comprehensive tables examining the strengths and weaknesses of every enemy that you'll face in detail (quite astonishingly useful, actually, seeing as without the game actually tells you to learn their vulnerabilities just by observation in the middle of a brutal firefight...!) - which does demonstrate a welcome indicator that the art direction of Soldner-X is impressive and detailed.
The game itself is a horizontal scrolling shooter. Scrolling shooters tend to be simple affairs in being resolutely and affirmedly 2D - that's why they're so popular with small developer groups - but Sidequest Studios has resolved to make the genre more appealing to our graphics-generation by sprucing it up and polishing presentation to a blinding gleam. Effusions of colour well out from every pixel, vessels are rendered in a varnished three dimensions, neon particle effects flash and seethe across the screen as ships exchange fire, backgrounds are fantastically detailed backdrops to frame the action (some enemy classes are even disguised against them!) and smears of burning orange bloom across the landscape as enemies detonate. Every level concludes with a slide-show cutscene depicting your fighter progressing to a new area, but while the plot is the usual shooter hokum - prototype fighter is the last, best, only hope against an unstoppable evil horde - and the narrator plainly doesn't have English as a first language, it does allow the superb painted art to be exhibited in full fine array, which is certainly nothing to complain of.
Soldner-X also is endowed with plenty of replay value. Scrolling Shooters are rarely cakewalks at the best of times, but Soldner-X is fantastically hard! I've played more than fifteen times and haven't even reached level three of ten yet - and you can only earn additional credits by success! Design is intelligent and inventive, with enemies that are diverse both in their indentity and their attack patterns, sometimes doing quite surprising things and taking unusual courses which will continually surprise and wrong-foot you... occasionally to the point of exasperation; those which actually home in on your ship and chase you around the screen will have you swearing at the screen. Even so, though, your frustrations can mainly be attributed to a lack of skill more than the game deliberately setting out to confound you. A global score leaderboard system is also installed into the game, so there is an incentive to push through and further even if the high score board on your PC is filled with your name alone.
The quality of the sound that frames such action is impressively high. Sound effects - from the pew-pew of your laser, the seething crackle of lighting bolts and the concussive bangs and barooms of detonating ships - are entirely competent, and the music is attractive, consisting of melodic techno and electronica themes that form an effective background to the sci-fi setting and futuristic action without deafeningly intruding into the actual gameplay. An announcer will even cut in at sections to praise or berate you: "Time to improve your score - go gettem all!", "Do you even know how to fly a ship?", "Outstanding! Nothing can stop you now!", "Not bad - looks like you've done this before" and so on" and so on - with an entertainingly bombastic voice; it constitutes an endearing and happy reminder of the arcade nature of the game - when you're going cross-eyed trying to weave a course through the bullet hell, it introduces a degree of levity and lets you focus on enjoying yourself.
The actual mechanics of shooting down the endless waves of foes have been curiously tweaked. Rather than having a single light feather-touch sending you spinning to oblivion, both you and your enemies have health bars (with a "Berzerker mode" that improves your damage and increases your armour engaging when the health bar diminishes to less than a fifth), and your weapons also have limited supplies of energy in order to encourage you not to just leave a brick weighing down the fire button whilst you toddle off to have a cup of tea. Bonuses are, of course, integral to the shooting experience - as recently relayed in GamesTM, a sense of empowerment is crucial to the captivating appeal of the genre, and upgrading your weapons from a weedy pop-gun to a blazing and furious pillar of scathing incandescent oblivion is a crucial manner of attaining that catharthic pleasure. The manner in which Soldner-X acquires them, however, is distinct. Defeated enemies occasionally drop bonuses (and some even slyly discharge negative bonuses which harm your abilities!), but in the main you need to utilises the "chain" system. A bonus bar levels-up when you destroy a certain range of enemies with one weapon, but change your weapon before you've killed enough - or kill too many with the weapon you have equipped - and your progress will be lost and you'll need to charge that level again. Complete a certain number of levels, and a bonus is released for colection. It's an intriguing system: glancing down at the bottom of the screen to check your progress can be distracting, and being landed with an inappropriate weapon for the type of enemy you face can vex, but it does introduce a degree of strategy to what you'll dare to use when confronted by an entire wall of foes.
Overall, then, Soldner-X: Himmelssturmer is a celebration of old-school hi-octane arcade blasting action, with enough refinements to keep it fresh and appealing to modern sensibilities as well as retro enthusiasts. It's a worthy first effort from Sidequest Studios, a good marquee for Play Asia to promote its own proprietry publishing line, and for those who want to both leap in with all guns blazing and take a more tactical view of their firefights, Soldner-X can satisfy it with eminent explosiveness.